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A geographic study of race and gender, Spatializing Blackness casts light upon the ubiquitous--and ordinary--ways carceral power functions in places where African Americans live. Moving from the kitchenette to the prison cell, and mining forgotten facts from sources as diverse as maps and memoirs, Rashad Shabazz explores the myriad architectures of confinement, policing, surveillance, urban planning, and incarceration. In particular, he investigates how the ongoing carceral effort oriented and imbued black male bodies and gender performance from the Progressive Era to the present. The result is an essential interdisciplinary study that highlights the racialization of space, the role of containment in subordinating African Americans, the politics of mobility under conditions of alleged freedom, and the ways black men cope with--and resist--spacial containment.

A timely response to the massive upswing in carceral forms within society, Spatializing Blackness examines how these mechanisms came to exist, why society aimed them against African Americans, and the consequences for black communities and black masculinity both historically and today.

How economic transformation and the spirit world collide in hypermodern Singapore

 

In Singapore, the financial center of Southeast Asia, hyperurbanization and commercial development exist alongside enduring belief in the economic power of ghosts: in their ability to control the flows of money and value and to determine the outcome of investments and wagers. Spectropolis explores the unlikely collusion of these two systems, demonstrating both the productive role of popular beliefs in the modern world and the surprising correlations between “late” capitalism and the workings of the spirit realm.

Detailing the logic and practices of Singapore’s ghost economy—from performing exorcisms on real estate development sites to offering money and commodities to the dead as a hedge against precarious real-world transactions—Joshua Comaroff shows how speculative finance, largely governed by chance and volatility, is understood via its inherently spectral qualities. Through the influence of Chinese Buddhist-Taoist thought, the movement of capital is placed under the sway of cosmology and geomancy, resulting in a built environment that is both technologically advanced and quite literally enchanted.

Based on detailed case studies and years of extensive fieldwork, Spectropolis argues for the power of popular belief systems to theorize contemporary socioeconomic conditions and to give form to collective affect as well as shared aspirations and anxieties. As Comaroff demonstrates, the uniquely all-consuming nature of Singapore’s tightly compressed urban economy is such that it may subsume even that which lies beyond the threshold of life itself.

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Reclaiming Jean Toomer as a radical innovator of African American modernist poetics.

In Split-Gut Song, Karen Jackson Ford looks at what it means to be African American, free, and creative by analyzing Jean Toomer's main body of work, specifically, his groundbreaking creation Cane. When first published in 1923, this pivotal work of modernism was widely hailed as inaugurating a truly artistic African American literary tradition. Yet Toomer's experiments in literary form are consistently read in terms of political radicalism—protest and uplift—rather than literary radicalism.

Ford contextualizes Toomer's poetry, letters, and essays in the literary culture of his period and, through close readings of the poems, shows how they negotiate formal experimentation (imagism, fragmentation, dialect) and traditional African American forms (slave songs, field hollers, call-and-response sermons, lyric poetry). At the heart of Toomer's work is the paradox that poetry is both the saving grace of African American culture and that poetry cannot survive modernity. This contradiction, Ford argues, structures Cane, wherein traditional lyric poetry first flourishes, then falters, then falls silent.

The Toomer that Ford discovers in Split-Gut Song is a complicated, contradictory poet who brings his vexed experience and ideas of racial identity to both conventional lyric and experimental forms. Although Toomer has been labelled a political radical, Ford argues that politics is peripheral in his experimental, stream-of-consciousness work. Rather Toomer exhibits a literary radicalism as he struggles to articulate his perplexed understanding of race and art in 20th-century America.
 

Explores the conflict between capitalism and tradition in an immigrant community.

A philosophical anthropology of everyday experience, this book is also a deeply informed and thought-provoking reflection on the work of cultural critique. States of Exception looks into a community of immigrants from India living in southern New Jersey—a group to whom the author, as a daughter of two of its members, enjoyed unprecedented access.

The cultural reverberations of Central America’s failed revolutions on US intellectual thought

The thwarted Central American revolutions during the latter half of the twentieth century marked a watershed in what had become a global anti-imperialist movement striving for a more egalitarian future. Examining a range of documentary, literary, and artistic works, States of Defeat looks at how left-wing intellectuals in the United States reckoned with the fallout from these defeats through wide-ranging creative expressions of indignation, cynicism, and grief.

As he argues for the historical significance of Central America in the transition out of the Cold War, Eric A. Vázquez shows how the unfulfilled revolutionary ambitions in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala prompted intellectuals in the United States to reexamine their desires for radical transformation. Analyzing novels, memoirs, anthropological writings, documentary film, and archival materials from the 1980s and 1990s, he demonstrates how these texts prefigured later anxieties about secrecy and securitization, the rise of nongovernmental organizational forms, and state failure.

Examining the legacies of unfulfilled anti-imperialist political ideals and their implications for the global left in the twenty-first century, States of Defeat offers a renewed perspective on the function of Central America in the US imagination. Amid a resurgence of crackdowns on public protest and a rise in virulent anti-immigrant campaigns throughout the United States and globally, Vázquez presents urgent and valuable insights into the viability of political solidarity and state power.

Considers the question “Who is a Jew?”— a critical rhetorical issue with far-reaching consequences for Jews and non-Jews alike

Hatzaad Harishon ("The First Step") was a New York-based, multiracial Jewish organization that worked to increase recognition and legitimacy for Black Jews in the sixties and seventies. In Stepping into Zion, Janice W. Fernheimer examines the history and archives of Hatzaad Harishon to illuminate the shifting definitions and borders of Jewish identity, which have critical relevance to Jews of all traditions as well as to non-Jews.

Fernheimer focuses on a period when Jewish identity was in flux and deeply influenced by the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. In 1964, white and Black Jews formed Hatzaad Harishon to foster interaction and unity between Black and white Jewish communities. They raised the question of who or what constitutes Jewishness or Jewish identity, and in searching for an answer succeeded—both historically and rhetorically—in gaining increased recognition for Black Jews. Fernheimer traces how, despite deep disagreement over definitions, members of Hatzaad Harishon were able to create common ground in a process she terms "interruptive invention": an incremental model for rhetorical success that allows different groups to begin and continue important but difficult discussions when they share little common ground or make unequal claims to institutional and discursive power, or when the nature of common ground is precisely what is at stake. Consequently, they provide a practical way out of the seemingly incommensurable stalemate incompatible worldviews present.

Through insightful interpretations of Hatzaad Harishon's archival materials, Fernheimer chronicles the group's successes and failures within the larger rhetorical history of conflicts that emerge when cultural identities shift or expand.

A true-to-life impression of Storyville, the only legally established red light district in the US

At the turn of the twentieth-century, there were hundreds of red-light districts in the United States, ranging in size from a discreet “house” or two in or near small towns and cities to block after bawdy block of brothels in larger cities such as Chicago and San Francisco. Storyville, New Orleans: Being an Authentic, Illustrated Account of the Notorious Red Light District seeks to offer the reader a reasonably true-to-life impression of Storyville, the most famous of the large districts and the only such district in the United States that was legally established.

Storyville was an area, carefully defined by law, outside of which prostitutes or women “notoriously abandoned to lewdness” were not permitted to live or work. Prostitutes working within the District were considered to be engaged in legal enterprises so long as they confined themselves to prostitution and other related activities such as dispensing food and drink to their customers.

From the early days of the French colony of Louisiana, a great number of prostitutes, women from correctional centers, and those with so-called “loose morals” were transported to the New World, resulting in a large proportion of the earliest female residents in New Orleans engaging in prostitution. During the course of Storyville’s legal existence from January 1, 1898 to November 12, 1917—it is evident that in establishing this district the New Orleans city council acted out of a sense of frustration after decades of attempting to deal rationally with a serious social problem. As the author says in the preface, “You may see this as a disorderly book about disorderly houses—and so it may be. But I doubt you will find it dull.”
 

Hospitality practices grounded in religious belief have long exercised a profound influence on Wisconsin’s Latino communities. Sergio M. González examines the power relations at work behind the types of hospitality--welcoming and otherwise--practiced on newcomers in both Milwaukee and rural areas of the Badger State. González’s analysis addresses central issues like the foundational role played by religion and sacred spaces in shaping experiences and facilitating collaboration among disparate Latino groups and across ethnic lines; the connections between sacred spaces and the moral justification for social justice movements; and the ways sacred spaces evolved into places for mitigating prejudice and social alienation, providing sanctuary from nativism and repression, and fostering local and transnational community building.

Perceptive and original, Strangers No Longer reframes the history of Latinos in Wisconsin by revealing religion’s central role in the settlement experience of immigrants, migrants, and refugees.